This invention relates to an imaging apparatus and a camera for vehicles.
Recently, an imaging apparatus is mounted on a vehicle and by using the image information imaged, control is performed so as to support a driver's driving operation and reduce driver's fatigue.
In the imaging element such as CCD used for the imaging apparatus for vehicles, when light of high luminance comes in, a charge amount limit that one pixel can accumulate (saturation capacity) is exceeded, and a phenomenon occurs that electric charge overflows in the signal acquisition direction. For this, when a high-luminance object is imaged, a low-luminance portion around a high-luminance object is also imaged brightly (blooming phenomenon) and a bright belt appears in a vertical direction of the high-luminance object (smear phenomenon). These phenomena become noises significantly disturbing the video, losing necessary information, and reducing the processing accuracy in the image processing. In the imaging apparatus for vehicles, such phenomena often occur at a sun inverse light in the morning and evening and the video is disturbed as shown in FIG. 2.
As a conventional technique to cope with the afore-mentioned problems, the camera apparatus includes a inverse light sensor unit, a filter drive unit and a filter control unit. When the inverse light sensor unit detects an incident state of a high-luminance light source within the imaging image range, i.e., the inverse light state, the filter unit is driven to cut off the high-luminance direct incident light (JP-A-6-75977) or a CCD element is offset toward a top with respect to the focusing range of the optical system so that a sun light is focused outside a use range of the CCD element, thereby obtaining an image with little smear (JP-A-11-331712).